Meanwhile the girl had come to her senses. This time her terror of Ahura was not so extreme. She could add nothing to the aged man’s tale.
They prepared to depart. The Mouser noted a certain veiled vindictiveness toward the girl, especially in the eyes of the woman with the child, for having tried to warn them. So turning in the doorway he said, “If you harm one hair of the girl’s head, we will return, and the black-bearded one with us, and the green light to guide us by and wreak terrible vengeance.”
He tossed a few gold coins on the floor and departed.
(And so, although, or rather because her family looked upon her as an ally of demons, the girl from then on led a pampered life, and came to consider her blood as superior to theirs, and played shamelessly on their fear of the Mouser and Fafhrd and Black-beard, and finally made them give her all the golden coins, and with them purchased seductive garments after fortunate passage to a faraway city, where by clever stratagem she became the wife of a satrap and lived sumptuously ever afterwards—something that is often the fate of romantic people, if only they are romantic enough.)
Emerging from the house, the Mouser found Fafhrd making a brave attempt to recapture his former berserk mood. “Hurry up, you little apprentice-demon!” he welcomed. “We’ve a tryst with the good land of snow and cannot lag on the way!”
As they rode off, the Mouser rejoined good-naturedly, “But what about the camel, Fafhrd? You can’t very well take it to the ice country. It’ll die of phlegm.”
“There’s no reason why snow shouldn’t be as good for camels as it is for men,” Fafhrd retorted. Then, rising in his saddle and turning back, he waved toward the house and shouted, “Lad! You that held the ax! When in years to come your bones feel a strange yearning, turn your face to the north. There you will find a land where you can become a man indeed.”
But in their hearts both knew that this talk was a pretense, that other planets now loomed in their horoscope—in particular one that shone with a greenish-yellow light. As they pressed on up the valley, its silence and the absence of animal and insect life now made sinister, they felt mysteries hovering all around. Some, they knew, were locked in Ahura, but both refrained from questioning her, moved by vague apprehensions of terrifying upheavals her mind had undergone.
Finally the Mouser voiced what was in the thoughts of both of them. “Yes, I am much afraid that Anra Devadoris, who sought to make us his apprentices, was only an apprentice himself and apt, apprentice-wise, to take credit for his master’s work. Black-beard is gone, but the beardless one remains. What was it Ningauble said?…no simple creature, but a mystery?…no single identity, but a mirage?”
“Well, by all the fleas that bite the Great Antiochus, and all the lice that tickle his wife!” remarked a shrill, insolent voice behind them. “You doomed gentlemen already know what’s in this letter I have for you.”
They whirled around. Standing beside the camel—he might conceivably have been hidden, it is true, behind a nearby boulder—was a pertly grinning brown urchin, so typically Alexandrian that he might have stepped this minute out of Rakotis with a skinny mongrel sniffing at his heels. (The Mouser half expected such a dog to appear at the next moment.)
“Who sent you, boy?” Fafhrd demanded. “How did you get here?”
“Now who and how would you expect?” replied the urchin. “Catch.” He tossed the Mouser a wax tablet. “Say, you two, take my advice and get out while the getting’s good. I think so far as your expedition’s concerned, Ningauble’s pulling up his tent pegs and scuttling home. Always a friend in need, my dear employer.”
The Mouser ripped the cords, unfolded the tablet, and read:
“Greetings, my brave adventurers. You have done well, but the best remains to be done. Hark to the calling. Follow the green light. But be very cautious afterwards. I wish I could be of more assistance. Send the shroud, the cup, and the chest back with the boy as first payment.”
“Loki-brat! Regin-spawn!” burst out Fafhrd. The Mouser looked up to see the urchin lurching and bobbing back toward the Lost City on the back of the eagerly fugitive camel. His impudent laughter returned shrill and faint.
“There,” said the Mouser, “rides off the generosity of poor, penurious Ningauble. Now we know what to do with the camel.”
“Zutt!” said Fafhrd. “Let him have the brute and the toys. Good riddance to his gossiping!”
“Not a very high mountain,” said the Mouser an hour later, “but high enough. I wonder who carved this neat little path and who keeps it clear?”
As he spoke, he was winding loosely over his shoulder a long thin rope of the sort used by mountain climbers, ending in a hook.
It was sunset, with twilight creeping at their heels. The little path, which had grown out of nothing, only gradually revealing itself, now led them sinuously around great boulders and along the crests of ever-steeper rock-strewn slopes. Conversation, which was only a film on wariness, had played with the methods of Ningauble and his agents—whether they communicated with one another directly, from mind to mind, or by tiny whistles that emitted a note too high for human ears to hear, but capable of producing a tremor in any brother whistle or in the ear of the bat.
It was a moment when the whole universe seemed to pause. A spectral greenish light gleamed from the cloudy top ahead—but that was surely only the sun’s sky-reflected afterglow. There was a hint of all-pervading sound in the air, a mighty susurrus just below the threshold of hearing, as if an army of unseen insects were tuning up their instruments. These sensations were as intangible as the force that drew them onward, a force so feeble that they knew they could break it like a single spider-strand, yet did not choose to try.
As if in response to some unspoken word, both Fafhrd and the Mouser turned toward Ahura. Under their gaze she seemed to be changing momently, opening like a night flower, becoming ever more childlike, as if some master hypnotist were stripping away the outer, later petals of her mind, leaving only a small limpid pool, from whose unknown depths, however, dark bubbles were dimly rising.
They felt their infatuation pulse anew, but with a shy restraint on it. And their hearts fell silent as the hooded heights above, as she said, “Anra Devadoris was my twin brother.”
7: Ahura Devadoris
“I never knew my father. He died before we were born. In one of her rare fits of communicativeness my mother told me, ‘Your father was a Greek, Ahura. A very kind and learned man. He laughed a great deal.’ I remember how stern she looked as she said that, rather than how beautiful, the sunlight glinting from her ringleted, black-dyed hair.
“But it seemed to me that she had slightly emphasized the word ‘Your.’ You see, even then I wondered about Anra. So I asked Old Berenice the housekeeper about it. She told me she had seen Mother bear us, both on the same night.
“Old Berenice went on to tell me how my father had died. Almost nine months before we were born, he was found one morning beaten to death in the street just outside the door. A gang of Egyptian longshoremen who were raping and robbing by night were supposed to have done it, although they were never brought to justice—that was back when the Ptolemies had Tyre. It was a horrible death. He was almost pashed to a pulp against the cobbles.
“At another time Old Berenice told me something about my mother, after making me swear by Athena and by Set and by Moloch, who would eat me if I did, never to tell. She said that Mother came from a Persian family whose five daughters in the old times were all priestesses, dedicated from birth to be the wives of an evil Persian god, forbidden the embraces of mortals, doomed to spend their nights alone with the stone image of the god in a lonely temple ‘halfway across the world,’ she said. Mother was away that day, and Old Berenice dragged me down into a little basement under Mother’s bedroom and pointed out three ragged gray stones set among the bricks and told me they came from the temple. Old Berenice liked to frighten me, although she was deathly afraid of Mother.
“Of course I instantly went and told Anra, as I always did.”
The little path was leading sharply upward now, along the spine of a crest. Their horses went at a walk, first Fafhrd’s, then Ahura’s, last the Mouser’s. The lines were smoothed in Fafhrd’s face, although he was still very watchful, and the Mouser looked almost like a quaint child.